THOMAS DERR

"Thomas Derr writes with warmth and
intelligence and heart-stopping clarity. His
respect for his characters -- and his readers --
is present in every line and it's a thrill
to bear witness as they shout their own
names and barrel headlong into mistakes,
all in an effort to make themselves indelible.
What renders these stories so remarkable,
however, and what makes this debut so
memorable is a profound sense of nostalgia
for the choices his characters might have
made, the lives they might have lived, the
world as it might have been."
-Michael Knight

"Telephone Road is a collection of quiet and lasting power. Each of these moving stories is
roped with muscle and laced with original, earned insight. Thomas Derr renders his deeply
flawed, deeply human characters with rare grace and lyrical prose, and with his first book, he
establishes himself as one of the country's finest young writers."
-Bret Anthony Johnston

About Telephone Road

Telephone Road
lives in the after-image of the vanished object --
objects as dear to us, and as strange, as the
people with whom we share our lives. This linked
short story collection abandons the logic of
chronology for the deeper patterns of a life captured at
defining moments of renewal, suspended motion,
precocious nostalgia, and even vigilante justice.
Story by story, Telephone Road maps the changing
boundaries of the absence at the center of the
narrator's life, and is both haunted and haunting
in its pursuit of fixed experience in a world that it
knows to be constantly fading away. The violence
wrought on domestic objects in the opening story,
'Housebreaking,' echoes the theme of the stories
to come as we wind our way back through the
narrator's various homes, with their disparate styles
and their emblematic objects, toward the narrator's
formative years and foundational experiences.